The Big Picture
by Glynn Wilson

On Sunday, June 13, 1971, the day the New York Times published its first installment of the Pentagon Papers story on the Vietnam war, I was going on 13, living in the suburbs east of Birmingham, Alabama. About the only news I recall keeping up with in those days had to do with Alabama football and Atlanta Braves baseball.

Summer was fun then (before global warming had started to set in) and you could play outside without dying of heat exhaustion, although the air in Birmingham was pretty bad in those days. On CB radios truckers called it “Smoky City.”

On April 27, 1971, Hank Aaron had hit his 600th career home run, the third player ever to do so. On July 31 that year, Aaron hit a home run in the All-Star Game at Detroit’s Tiger Stadium. He would not break Babe Ruth’s all time home run record with number 715 until April 8, 1974, at a time when the end of the war in Vietnam was about a foregone conclusion.

Two big changes came to Alabama football in 1971. Wilbur Jackson was the first ever black player given a football scholarship to Alabama and John Mitchell, who made the team as a junior in 1971, was the first to actually play, eight years after the Alabama student body had been integrated. The Crimson Tide went undefeated that year, but lost to Nebraska in the Orange Bowl. I met Paul “Bear” Bryant in person around that time at an Alabama-USC basketball game.

I mention my personal history to try to inject a little reality into the garbling of Vietnam-era history that has accompanied the WikiLeaks release of the Afghanistan war logs last week, to make sure readers check in with Frank Rich at the New York Times today, and to make a related point but a different argument about recent criticism of President Barack Obama.

Read the rest of this entry »

Survivor Corps Supports Returning Troops and Their Families

Guest Column
by Dani Sevilla
SurvivorCorps.Org

Within the United States there are over one and a half million service members that have served in military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. More than 30,000 have been physically wounded, but many more have experienced less visible, psychological wounds.

Traumatic Brain Injury and Post Traumatic Stress Disorder have emerged as signature injuries of these conflicts, with recent reports suggesting an increase in rates of suicide, alcohol and drug abuse, homelessness, and domestic violence among returning service members and veterans.

These traumatic affects of conflict, left unaddressed, could have far-reaching negative consequences for the individuals affected, their families, and our country. Survivor Corps’ work in some of the most conflict affected countries in the world has shown community reintegration to be the key factor in those that overcome their traumatic experiences, and those that are consumed by them.

Operation Survivor

Ongoing conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan are creating a generation of veterans in the United States from all branches of the armed services and all 50 states who are struggling to overcome physical and psychosocial injuries. Most combat veterans convalescing in military hospitals across the country will survive physically, but getting on with their lives after returning home to their families and communities is proving a significant challenge for hundreds of thousands.

Among the 1.6 million who have served since 2001, suicide is on the rise, as is unemployment and incidents of substance abuse and domestic violence.

The successful reintegration of returning service members is an issue that will have a long-lasting impact on American society, and may become the single defining struggle facing this new generation of veterans.

Survivor Corps and its partners are determined to avoid the mistakes made when veterans returned from Vietnam, which resulted in tens of thousands of post-war suicides and over 200,000 men and women living on the streets.

To head off this tragic outcome, Survivor Corps will build peer support programs at the community level that will bring service members and veterans together for mutual support and encourage both individual responsibility and collective action to help others in need.

Survivor Corps is offering an alternative “treatment” that can be made readily available in all communities, regardless of proximity to traditional military or government centers of support. Our approach is nimble enough to address the needs of individual survivors, while still broad enough to build a coalition of survivors and service providers working to effect long-term positive change.

This new program will help the recovery and reintegration of hundreds of thousands of returning U.S. service members at a critical time for them and their country.

Click Here to read more about Operation Survivor